For everyone in Scotland, this is one of those days where you want to be curled up in bed with a good book. In Edinburgh a 60 second walk along Princes Street had me looking like a drowned rat earlier; the zoo and the castle both closed early because of the weather; and according to twitter someone on Blackford Hill measured the wind travelling at 76 miles an hour. Truly autumn is here – if by ‘autumn’ you mean minor apocalypse.
Continue reading “The Great Kindle Challenge: Day 7”
My life isn’t all about testing new methods of reading, oh no. I have a day job as well, and sometimes I get to forgo my lunch break there in order to attend glitzy media events as part of my freelance journalism career.
I say sometimes, but I actually mean this one time – last Tuesday, as a matter of fact. The event in question was the official announcement of the shortlisted authors up for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards, organised by the Scottish Book Trust and held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre – which is conveniently just up the road from my current temp job.
The Scottish Book Trust are rather wonderful, I have to say. They get children in every school across Scotland to vote in these awards, and two of the judges who whittled down the long list to the short were school kids themselves. Precocious ones, at that – I salute you, Lorna and Daniel, for some spectacularly verbose speechifying. I can only hope I was that erudite at thirteen (I wasn’t).
Oh, and I have to draw attention to the fact that the other judge, Duncan Wright, was voted school librarian of the year 2010. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a thing when I was in school, but I love the idea. I wonder if you can nominate librarians after the fact? Mine is retired now, but still fabulous. I shall have to look into that. School librarian lifetime achievement award in the post for S. Webb…
Anyway, the Scottish Book Trust do all sorts of amazing bits and pieces to get kids reading and to support Scottish authors; so having worked with kids and currently being a writer I feel totally justified in waxing sycophantic about them. Back in my past life as a library person I was an ambassador for their Bookstart Rhymetime sessions (now called Bookbug), which means I have an extensive repertoire of nursery rhymes available to sing at a moment’s notice, not to mention some pretty sweet moves. This is clearly one of the best life skills I have, although I still have questions about Peter Rabbit’s curly whiskers.*
I went along to this on behalf of The Edinburgh Reporter, and you can read my article about it here. It borrows a bit from the press release because as I had to go back to work I couldn’t really hang about getting interviews. As I said before, the world of freelance journalism is tres glamorous. But with any luck 12 books will make me a literary star and one day freelance-temps will be re-writing press releases about how I was nominated for this award.
Better go do some writing, then…
*animals like rabbits have whiskers to help them measure spaces so they never get stuck – surely a curly whisker is no use for that?
Yesterday’s list of reasons to hate the kindle got quite a lot of hits for comparatively little publicity, which is interesting. Presumably it reflects the mood of the internet at present. However, in the interests of impartiality (I still haven’t come down on either side of the fence) today I feel I probably ought to post some reasons why you should buy the kindle and love it more than your own children. This inclination is one of the trials and tribulations of being a revisionist historian/journalist – one must always look at both sides of the fictitious coin. Here goes. Continue reading “The Great Kindle Challenge: Day 5”
Today is the last day of August and therefore it feels like time for a progress report.
I have just over 15,000 words of book 8 written in a delightful stream of consciousness that makes no sense whatsoever; a situation unlikely to be improved by the fact I have a full day of work ahead of me and guests staying in the flat for a few days who it would be churlish to ignore.
I’ve been writing in first person from the point of view of several characters, and accidentally switching tenses all over the shop. This will almost certainly make for a narrative that feels immediate and tense and worthy of all manner of high praise… That or when I go back to it I’ll be so confused and irritated I’ll consign the whole lot to the recycle bin and try to forget it ever happened. I considered posting an extract by way of example, but to give you a proper sense of the nonsense it’d need to be 1k +, which seems inappropriately long for a blog post.
I have mostly been writing on my laptop, which has been the case with the bulk of the project, although I did actually scribble quite a few notes by hand this month (how retro) and I also typed out a few sections on my phone in queues at the Book Festival. To the untrained eye, I was the only loser who was playing on my phone instead of reading a book. Little did the general public know that in a couple of years they’ll be picking up the very book I was writing on my phone from the festival book shop! Muahahaha, etc. Except they really won’t. I can’t see book eight being my debut – not unless there is some kind of drastic book shortage that necessitates the publication of things that need so much re-writing it makes your eyes water.
By way of research (it’s scifi this month, by the by) I have read half of The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross and the first chapter of Neuromancer by William Gibson. Oh yes, I am that prolific a reader these days. It turns out having a vast pile of recommended books did not translate into having time to look at them all – who saw that coming, after my amazing track record?! The only book I’ve finished this month is The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein, which is a good story but doesn’t have much bearing on genre fiction. Not this genre, anyway.
Naturally I am disinclined to take responsibility for my own actions and therefore lay the blame for this appalling lack of reading squarely at the feet of festival season. To be fair the festival has been very distracting, although it has also been amazing in terms of making blog posts more diverse. In fact I would like to thank Andrew Blair, Emily Dodd, Ruth Dawkins, Harry Giles, Bethany Anderson and Mara from Toto Tales for their excellent guest posts; Amanda Palmer, Rod Jones and Andy Stanton for letting me interview them; and the Edinburgh International Book Festival for having me along to an amazing range of literary events over the past couple of weeks. All of you have made things a lot more colourful around here, and generally helped to set a blogging precedent I am unlikely to maintain.
Which is nice.
This is my last post about the book festival, which finished yesterday with what I can only assume was a life-changing production of Alasdair Gray’s Fleck (I don’t know for sure as I didn’t manage to get a ticket. Instead I went to see The Guard, a black comedy with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle which was very funny – highly recommended).
Said post contains my thoughts on a session I went to last week about graphic novels, run by Dr Mel (“don’t google Mel Gibson, google Dr Mel Comics!”) Gibson and self styled ‘comicker’ Emma Vieceli.
“I had a crush on Asterix,” offers Emma early on in the discussion.
“Fair enough,” Dr Mel lies effortlessly (or maybe she really does think it’s fair enough. Who am I to judge.) “We had Asterix in the school library in every single European language other than English. English was cheating.”
Continue reading “Getting to Grips With Graphic Novels”
There is a copy of singer James Yorkston’s book, It’s Lovely To Be Here: The Touring Diaries of a Scottish Gent, in our house. I know because I bought it as a birthday present for my flat mate, who says it’s very good. Unfortunately I haven’t borrowed it yet, mainly because my mighty pyramid of to-read books is so enormous it hurts my brain. Still, that didn’t stop me going to see Mr Yorkston talking about it with Ian Rankin at the book festival over the weekend.
It was a great event, the atmosphere was very friendly and there was cheery banter aplenty. After a brief overview of his new guitar (made from Tazmanian blackwood, spruce and Brazilian Rosewood), Rankin began by asking about Yorkston’s background.
He grew up in Fife and attended Madras college in St Andrews, a few years below Kenny (King Creosote) Anderson and amongst such luminaries as KT Tunstall and Steve Mason from The Beta Band. Listening to him describe his early years “dancing with my across the road neighbour, Vic Galloway (a BBC Scotland presenter and DJ) like dafties on the lawn,” it strikes me the East Neuk is overdue an Almost Famous style look at the music scene – there are so many artists compressed into that area it’s a bit ridiculous.
Apparently Yorkston wrote his first song at the age of 8, him on electric guitar and Galloway on banjo. “It went, baa baa goes the cow, moo moo goes the sheep, woof woof goes the hippopotamus and they all went to sleep.”
I felt exactly like Cameron Crowe as I typed that up, seriously. This could work.
Continue reading “James Yorkston at Edinburgh Book Festival”
12 Books in 12 Months 